Ethics in the News

social media

This essay was the runner up in the Graduate Category of the Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics 2017

Written by University of Oxford student, Jonas Haeg

Introduction

This paper concerns the ethics of a relatively new and rising trend in political campaigning: the use of “political bots” (henceforth “polibots”). Polibots are amalgamations of computer code acting on social mediate platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) so as to mimic persons in order to gain influence over political opinions amongst people.

Currently, “many computer scientists and policy makers treat bot-generated traffic as a nuisance to be detected and managed”[1]. This policy and opinion implies a particular ethical view of their nature, namely that there is something inherently morally problematic about them. Here, I question the aforementioned view of polibots. After presenting a brief sketch of what polibots are, I formulate three potential arguments against their use, but argue that none of them succeed in showing that polibots are intrinsically morally problematic. Continue reading →

I run a practical ethics course at Royal Holloway for second- and third-year undergraduates, and today our topic was friendship and social media. More specifically, we considered whether the increasing tendency for our friendships to be mediated and maintained through the use of websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr might be changing the nature of our friendships, and whether this is a good or a bad thing. Continue reading →

‘Technology has made life different, but not necessarily more stressful’, says a recent article in the New York Times, summarising the findings of a study by researchers at the Pew Research Center and Rutgers University. It is often thought that frequent internet and social media use increases stress. Digital unplugging, along with losing weight and quitting smoking, is seen as a healthy thing to do. But, said the article, we needn’t worry so much. Frequent internet and social media users don’t have higher stress levels than less frequent users, and indeed women who frequently use Twitter, email and photo-sharing apps (and who use these media for life-event sharing more than men – who tend to be less self-disclosing online) scored 21% lower on the stress scale than women who did not.

I suggest that, far from being reassuring, these results are very sinister indeed. They indicate that internet technology (or at least something that has happened to humans at the same time as internet technology has been happening to them) has effected a tectonic transformation in the human constitution. The outsourcing, digitalization and trivializing of our relationships should make us stressed. If it doesn’t, something seriously bad has happened. The stress response enables us to react appropriately to threats. Switch it off, and we’re in danger. Only a damaged immune response fails to kick off when there are bacteria around. A tiger confined in a tiny concrete pen has lost a lot of its tigerishness if it doesn’t pace frustratedly up and down, its cortisol levels through the roof. Continue reading →

Two recent court cases in America highlight the difficulties we face in making ethical sense of social media and individual identity. The cases are quite different – one involves the denial of access to social media, while the others requires its use – but each raises seemingly unresolvable questions about the relation between our internet presences and ourselves.

In Portland, 26-year-old nursing assistant Nai Mai Chao has been convicted of invasion of privacy, for posting to Facebook photographs of patients at the nursing home where she worked. The patients were photographed, without their knowledge, on bedpans and in other embarrassing postures. Chao and her friends evidently wrote mocking comments on the Facebook post. One patient reportedly felt “humiliated” when told about the photograph’s public circulation; he died three months later. As a result of the case, Chao lost her nursing license, has been barred from similar employment, and spent eight days in prison. And she is prohibited from accessing Facebook.

Meanwhile, in Cincinnati, Mark Byron was found in contempt of a Domestic Violence Civil Protection Order, after posting to his Facebook wall that his estranged wife was an “evil, vindictive woman” and allowing his friends to write abusive and threatening comments about her. Although Elizabeth Byron could not directly access Mark Byron’s wall (they are not Facebook ‘friends’), mutual contacts alerted her to the posts. The court then ruled that Mark Bryon’s comments were “clearly intended to be mentally abusive”, found him in contempt, and gave him a choice. He could accept jail time, or post an apology – one written for him by the magistrate – on his Facebook wall every single day for one month. Byron chose the latter.